From His Daughter's Bat Mitzvah Invitation To a Kit You Can Buy

You might have seen our new Stardream layered invitations and read the recent blog article, "How To Assemble Stardream Bar & Bat Mitzvah Invitations At Home." Now you'll read words directly from the Stardream layered invitations designer, LCI's own Barry Levine. The twist to this story is that when Barry was designing the invitation for his daughter, he never imagined it would be sold on our web site.

Stardram Bar Mitzvah invitation "I was working on it privately. We’re a little less than a year away from the Bat Mitzvah of my oldest daughter and I had some time on my hands. I figured I would get started with it because the plan is to create our own invitations."

Noticing the transition from Barry's personal invitation design for his daughter's up-coming Bat Mitzvah to a series of invitations to be made available to LCI's customers, and noticing Barry's occasionally squirming during the process, I had to ask him more about the experience.

"I didn’t really plan on it that way. My intent was to do a creation of my own. I was playing around with colors, with type, with design... Nobody gets the design right on the first attempt. I also wanted to give my daughter a chance to see various layouts to see what she liked because her input in all of this is important to me. I’ve been around design and printing for more years than I care to admit right now. So I want to make sure that it’s a design that not only I’m happy with, but my daughter -- it’s her event and it’s a memorable event and I want all parts of the event to be a memory for her, not just the event itself but what goes around the planning of it."

Barry Levine "I’m not claiming to be a premier designer, but I take a lot of pride in the stuff that I create. Especially when it’s personal to my own family, yeah, I have this little bit of reluctance to share it with the public, especially since the event hasn’t even happened yet. I don’t want someone else coming out with the design before I even send mine out."

With a smile, I pointed out that fact that unless he changes his design, that’s going to happen because the invitation is already available on our site.

"I understand that. That’s not to say that I won’t change it. I haven’t carved anything in stone yet. Do I like what I did? Sure I do. Apparently other people do too."

The entire invitation ensemble is designed with Stardream stock, a brand of specialty paper produced by Italian manufacturer Gruppo Cordenons. I asked Barry about that choice.

"I liked the color variety that some of the Stardream stocks offered. I thought that my daughter would also like the various colors that I showed her. I think Stardream has a little more of an offering to the specific designs I was working on than maybe some of the color palettes that we have in other stocks."

Barry closed with this thought regarding the inspiration he feels when he sees other invitation designs. He hopes that his designs and the other invitations at LCIPaper.com can inspire our customers.

Stardram Bar Mitzvah invitation "Every time I see a new invitation, it inspires me a little bit in thought for how I could create my own invitation. That will always happen and that’s why we try to show printed invitations on our site so that people can give themselves a little bit of a catalyst in what they may come up with. They may use bits and pieces of a design that they see that we’ve created on our site. Even if it’s just that, then it’s served its purpose. My personal feelings are that when I see different invitations, there are different elements about them that I may like that I’ll try to remember for later use in something that I’m doing. And that happens on a daily basis."